AirSpace: ‘this strange geography created by technology’
Why is AirSpace happening? One answer is that the internet and its progeny — Foursquare, Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb — is to us today what television was in the last century, with “a certain ability to transmit and receive and then apply layers of affection and longing and doubt,” as George W.S. Trow wrote in his paranoiac masterpiece of media criticism, “Within the Context of No Context,” originally published in The New Yorker in 1980. But instead of Trow’s “grid of 200 million,” American television viewers, we now have a global grid of 1.6 billion: Facebook’s population of monthly active users, all acting and interacting more or less within the same space, learning to see and feel and want the same things.
The connective emotional grid of social media platforms is what drives the impression of AirSpace. If taste is globalized, then the logical endpoint is a world in which aesthetic diversity decreases. It resembles a kind of gentrification: one that happens concurrently across global urban centers. Just as a gentrifying neighborhood starts to look less diverse as buildings are renovated and storefronts replaced, so economically similar urban areas around the world might increasingly resemble each other and become interchangeable.
In their introduction to The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization, the fashion scholars Eugenia Paulicelli and Hazel Clark write that this “aesthetic gentrification… divides the new world map in the light of a softer post-Cold War prejudice: the fashionable and the unfashionable world.” In other words, we are experiencing an isolationism of style versus one of politics or physical geography, though it still falls along economic lines. You either belong to the AirSpace class or you don’t.